Thanks to the generosity of a regular reader of this blog, I’ve received a copy of Graham Robb’s new book The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts. (Published as The Ancient Paths in Britain.) It just arrived last night, so I haven’t gotten very far in the book yet. It’s probably going to take me some time to read through it since, unlike fringe history topics, the book is a bit dense and requires some thought to evaluate its claims. Off the bat, one thing that annoys me to no end is that the publisher chose to forgo numbered endnotes in favor of having no notes muddying the pages but rather citations keyed to page numbers listed at the end of the book. While this is fine for narrative nonfiction, for a book that lives and dies by its source material, it makes it more difficult to find what’s being cited.

I also immediately noticed that most of the reviews I’ve read of the book took their material almost exclusively from the preface, venturing only rarely into the actual 300-page substance of the book. The newspapers and magazines that published these reviews ought to demand their money back if they paid people to review a book and they did little more than read the opening lines. So, what of the substance? Well, in the preface the author outlines his interest in the subject and the shock of realization that led him to conclude that the Celts of the Iron Age (defined by Robb as between 800 BCE and 600 CE) arranged their various settlements along a grid organized by sight lines derived from the solstice position of the sunrise. Robb says that he discovered this not by observation but by using online mapping software, which troubles me some. I can’t really evaluate the claim at this point because I have not read far enough to learn more of it. I was, though, particularly bothered by Robb’s self-important claim that his discovery was so momentous that he immediately swore his publishers to secrecy and refused to share his ideas with his friends in academia, lest they be called upon to reveal these claims before… well, he never exactly says before this book was published, but that’s the implication. He said that he worried that his academic friends would have to pretend not to know about this magnificent new idea (why?) during the years between its discovery and publication. At this point, I immediately recalled Martin Gardiner’s first characteristic of the pseudoscientist: “He works in isolation. He does not send his findings to the recognized journals…” Surely, such a tremendous discovery as the lost archaeoastronomy of the Celtic world—and by a Ph.D. scholar of some acclaim—deserved at least a cursory write up in an academic publication. In fact, in an interview, Robb said he consulted only one expert, an archaeologist, and then only about neo-Druids. When Robb began wondering—repeatedly!—why no one else could see what he, uniquely, saw and understood, I recalled another of Gardiner’s traits: that the pseudoscientist thinks himself a genius with unique insight that no others can see, and indeed will persecute him for in their ignorance. Robb, of course, conforms in discussing how academics dismissed his suggestions of Celtic science as impossible. Whether this is right or wrong (I have not read enough to decide), the picture isn’t looking very good. Robb’s first claim is that the Via Heracles, a semi-mythic path stretching, according to Robb, in a straight line from the Sacred Promontory (near Cape St. Vincent) on the Portuguese coast to the Alps, is an Iron Age Celtic creation and that Celtic settlements are aligned along its path in a way that is not coincidental. He provides a map showing this straight line along with several settlements along it, six of which are named Mediolanum, a Gaullish word meaning “middle of the plain” (as in the center of farmland), but which he takes to mean “middle earth,” as in the plane suspended between heaven and hell, the Midgard of the Norse-Germanic religions. He provides no citation or explanation of why we should favor his interpretation, and in fact he uses the passive voice—“is thought to be related” to avoid mentioning sources at all. I confess I am at a loss as to where the information came from. Theodor Hertzl Gaster mentioned the idea in Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (1975), but otherwise I have been unable to find evidence of this version; every other source I consulted names it as the middle of the plain. As for the map, while it is interesting, it is also incomplete. It shows several settlements along one line, but even at Robb’s chosen scale, the settlements are not precisely aligned but rather within a reasonable distance from it. The map also leaves me unable to gauge its accuracy because it does not include other Celtic settlements. Surely there were more than fourteen Celtic settlements in all of Iberia and southern Gaul. Do these others fall along the line or other lines? Or is this line simply a best fit line among some settlements? Obviously, they are conditioned on accepting an alignment to the Sacred Promontory, which began as a Neolithic rather than an Iron Age ritual site. The Greeks founded a temple of Heracles there and though the land had been ruled by serpent people before them. Of the fourteen settlements shown, just from the map four can be explained entirely by their location on the French coast, and a fifth at the conjunction of two rivers. A line can be drawn from the Sacred Promontory to the southern coast of France, but that’s a fact of geography, not archaeoastronomy. It is not clear archaeologically that the Celts were present in all the lands Robb cites at the origin point for his alignment, 800 BCE. In fact, the third figure of his book shows Celtic settlements in Iberia, and of the dozens shown, only one is on the line. As we move deeper into chapter one, Robb makes a series of unacknowledged claims that are, frankly, a bit difficult to identify and tease apart. The first is the assumption that the Celtic peoples from Iberia to the Alps shared a coherent set of myths, sciences, and idea across boundaries of time, space, language, and culture. Robb himself concedes that the Celts were not a single ethnic group but many, with similarities of culture, so it is not clear at this point in the book how he sees these various groups working together across time and space to construct a sacred landscape during the same centuries when the Phoenicians and Greeks were colonizing the same territory. The next claim is that all of these Celtic groups had a hero figure who was broadly parallel to the Greek Heracles, the Roman Hercules, and the Phoenician Melqart, all of whom were supposedly identified with him. This is the warrant for the next claim, that the Via Heracles is a Celtic path in honor of this god. In turn, Robb uses this to claim that he, apparently uniquely, has been able to reconstruct this Celtic Heracles’ myth by piecing together pieces of Heracles myths from ancient texts. This is very much an interpretation, and I am not sure how we can weave these disparate pieces together. Robb does not clearly differentiate the ancient material from his own weaving together of the same, based primarily on the Greek myth of Heracles’ theft of Geryon’s cattle, a myth almost certainly known in Greece before the Greeks colonized Iberia in the 700s BCE and derived from old Indo-European cattle-rustling myths. Here are some of the texts Robb cites (in standard translations linked below), but does not quote, in manufacturing a reconstructed story of “Gaulish Heracles”:

But the inhabitants of those [Celtic] countries affirm this beyond all else, and I have also read it inscribed upon their monuments, that Hercules, the son of Amphitryon, hastened to destroy the cruel tyrants Geryon and Tauriscus, of whom one oppressed Spain, the other, Gaul; and having overcome them both that he took to wife some high-born women and begat numerous children, who called by their own names the districts which they ruled. (Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman Antiquities15.9.6) This range, beginning at the sea called anciently the sea of the Bebryces, but later the sea of the Narbonenses, reaches to the great outer sea, and contains many diverse nationalities; it also separates the whole of Spain from the neighbouring land of Gaul. The tribes were neither of one speech, nor did they have a common government. As a result, they were not known by one name: the Romans called them Spaniards, but the Greeks Iberians, from the river Iberus. (Cassius Dio, fragment of 13.21 in Zonaras 8.21) But since we have mentioned the pillars of Heracles, we deem it to be appropriate to set forth the facts concerning them. When Heracles arrived at the farthest points of the continents of Libya and Europe which lie upon the ocean, he decided to set up these pillars to commemorate his campaign. And since he wished to leave upon the ocean a monument which would be had in everlasting remembrance, he built out both the promontories, they say, to a great distance; consequently, whereas before that time a great space had stood between them, he now narrowed the passage, in order that by making it shallow and narrow he might prevent the great sea-monsters from passing out of the ocean into the inner sea, and that at the same time the fame of their builder might be held in everlasting remembrance by reason of the magnitude of the structures. Some authorities, however, say just the opposite, namely, that the two continents were originally joined and that he cut a passage between them, and that by opening the passage he brought it about that the ocean was mingled with our sea. On this question, however, it will be possible for every man to think as he may please. (Diodorus Siculus 4.18.4-5) But Aeschylus, in the play entitled Prometheus lyomenos, says that he is Hercules, fighting not with the dragon, but with the Ligurians. For he says that at the time Hercules was driving away the cattle of Geryon, he journeyed through the territory of the Ligurians. They joined forces in trying to take the herd from him, and pierced many of the beasts [?] with arrows. But after Hercules’ weapons failed, worn out by the number of the barbarians and lack of arms, he fell to his knees, already suffering from many wounds. Jove, however, out of pity for his son, provided that there should be a great supply of stones around him. With these Hercules defended himself and put the enemy to flight. And so Jove put the image of his fighting form among the constellations. (Hyginus, Astronomica2.6) But Chrysaor was joined in love to Callirrhoe, the daughter of glorious Ocean, and begot three-headed Geryones. Him mighty Heracles slew in sea-girt Erythea by his shambling oxen on that day when he drove the wide-browed oxen to holy Tiryns, and had crossed the ford of Ocean and killed Orthus and Eurytion the herdsman in the dim stead out beyond glorious Ocean. (Hesiod, Theogony289f.) They [the Gauls] were a savage, bold, and warlike nation, and were the first after Hercules (to whom that undertaking procured great admiration for his valour, and a belief in his immortality), to pass the unconquered heights of the Alps, and places uninhabitable from excess of cold. (Justin, Epitome24.4)

It goes on for many more citations, but I think you begin to get the picture. He has combined, seemingly at will, various Greek myths about Heracles’ journey in the west and attributed all of them to a preexisting Celtic myth. Aside from Ammianus Marcellinus’ passage, I don’t see any clear evidence for why we should concur with this, since the Greeks are well known to have imposed their mythology on peoples they encountered, and the Heracles myth, most scholars believe, preexisted the Greeks’ encounters with Spain and Gaul. Just as the Greeks applied a sub-Mycenaean Argonaut myth of the fictional land of Aea to newly-discovered Colchis, they also stretched Heracles’ adventure with Geryon (which in Hesiod c. 700 BCE is in the mythical Erytheia in the imaginary farthest West) to the newly-found geography of the West, with Stesichorus first identifying Erytheia with Tartessus in Iberia, an apparently non-Celtic land. Robb does not deal with the Greek influence and instead declares that these passages refer to “a tribal chief, sometime in the late Bronze Age, who grew rich through cattle-rustling, or a warrior-king who pacified prehistoric tribes…” This kind of euhemerizing is rather simplistic and plays into Robb’s conviction that the Celts were scientists and truth-tellers; even their myths, he claims, are based not on flights of fancy but on real history. The table of contents does not indicate a further search for the historical Heracles. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem except that this reconstruction needs to be true to support the claim that his version of the Via Heraclea is an Iron Age Celtic construction. He bases the claim on Pseudo-Aristotle’s third-century BCE text “Wonderful Things,” in which a safe-passage route called the Road of Heracles is described. “They say that there is a road called ‘the Heraclean’ from Italy as far as the Celts, Celtoligyes, and Iberians, through which, if a Greek or native travels, he is guarded by the inhabitants, that no harm may befall him; and that they exact punishment from those through whom such harm comes” (85). There is no indication this is a solar path. The trouble is that the historical Via Heraclea was not a straight line across Spain but rather a road that dipped farther south along the Mediterranean coast, according to most scholars, who see it as being roughly the same as the Via Domitia or the Via Augusta. Robb’s “Via Heraclea” is an imaginary road that he assumes was meant to follow the solar alignments, but which doesn’t match the facts on the ground. At this point, all he’s done is traffic in assumptions and the geographic coincidence that a line drawn across France’s southern coast hits the Sacred Promontory.

I have marked Robb's Via Heraclea in blue, and in red you see the historical Roman Via Herculea, later replaced by other Roman roads.

As you can see from the map, the “mythic” Via Heraclea is different than the historical one. Worse, the mythic one doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the line were meant to be a projection of a direction (northeast), it should slowly spiral northwards, away from the French coast. If it were meant to be the sun’s path, it should slowly curve as well. If it were meant to be a Great Circle line (to what endpoint?) it should also curve away from the French coast. In other words, the line only appears straight on a modern flat projection. So are we to assume the Celts believed the world was flat and used modern projections? According to Robb—in a footnote no less—each location along the path “standardized” the line according to the local solar conditions, in effect negating the curvature of the earth. He bases this on two points, the Sacred Promontory and the Matrona Pass (Montgenèvre) in the Alps. Apparently, what he did was draw a line on a map based on the solstice line at the Sacred Promontory (a Neolithic site), determined it crossed the Matrona Pass, and then back-formed a “standardized” alignment (corrected, he says, every few miles across Europe!) to fit the line. It gets worse. Adopting nineteenth century solar hero claims, Robb asserts that Heracles was a sun god and his twelve labors (only canonized in 600 BCE by Peisander) represented the twelve signs of the zodiac (themselves adopted as a fixed set of twelve only after 500 BCE). Somehow, though, the Celts got hold of all this centuries earlier, if we follow the claims made by Robb, built the road sometime between 800 and 600 BCE and therefore centuries later Hannibal was able to use the solar god and the sun path to invade Italy. The warrant for this, and I am not making this up, is the statement in Livy that “In those days none of you thought the journey long, though it stretched from the lands of the sunset to the sunrise” (30.4). This he takes for a reference to the solstice alignment of the Via Heraclea, rejecting the mainstream idea that it meant poetically a long way from west to east. He reads this in conjunction with Polybius, who wrote that the Carthaginians failed to ask the Celts how to cross the Alps; instead gave out the story that “some hero appeared and showed the road” (3.48). Robb wants us to believe this statement is confused and that instead Hannibal was privy to an ancient cult tradition and followed the Celtic Heracles—the “hero”—along the Via Heraclea. The Greek word used, however, is not restricted to the meaning of demigod and could mean a brave man, and in this case probably referred back to the first clause of the sentence, suggesting that a Celt bravely decided to point the way, if only to get the army out of the Celtic lands.

Perhaps later chapters will improve on this and offer a better explanation, but so far, this is not going so well. I can’t quite get past the idea that Robb had extrapolated from a quirk of geography (that the Sacred Promontory and the Col de Montgenèvre, the lowest pass of the Alps, can be connected along a straight line approximating the solstice line) the idea that the Celts knew of this, made use of it, and created an entire landscape of cosmic geography based on it. I don’t doubt that the Celts had ideas about geography and may even had sophisticated ways of reckoning distance and direction across the landscape, perhaps even using solar lines, but I will need more to be convinced that they produced a perfectly accurate map of Western Europe and plotted their settlements in accordance with faultlessly corrected solstice lines. Did the Celts of the Alps even know there was a Sacred Promontory in Portugal?

Overall, the opening pages of The Discovery of Middle Earth remind me of Robert Bauval’s The Orion Mystery. There’s the same claim that an expert in one field (engineering for Bauval and French literature for Robb) has made an astonishing astronomical alignment discovery based on computer software and unique interpretations of myth. There’s also the same veiled praise for fringe ideas (ancient astronauts for Bauval and ley lines for Robb) that inspired the supposedly astounding new idea.

I am SO disappointed. I was really hoping that when you actually got this book--thank you to whoever got together and sent it/the money for it to Jason!--it would prove to be something that had a bit more real information in it.

While the use of satellite mapping technology has led to some interesting discoveries, it seems like the crux of this guy's argument is "two points make a line." To which the response is, "Oh, did you finally pass fourth-grade math?" SO disappointed. Dude is giving Celts a bad name with this rubbish.

I HOPE that it gets better as you get farther into the book...but I'm not holding my breath for it.

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Mandalore

11/13/2013 09:06:55 am

To be honest, I am always a bit skeptical concerning supposedly scholarly historical books (especially those purportedly to revolutionize our understanding of whatever it is) by people with little to no historical training. That isn't to say that history is the exclusive domain of the academic historian, Jason is a great example of that, but there are basic methodologies for good research, which again Jason is a great example of.

Dr. Robb is not a historian, but earned his degree in French Literature. I am sure his work in that subject is very good, but I am not surprised that this foray into paradigm shifting history is questionable at best. History is always shifting as new ideas are introduced and debated (a fact ignored by fringe researchers), but it needs to be based on solid research backed up with as much evidence as possible.

Perhaps this book will get better as Jason works through it. At the least, there appears to be no modern objectives/biases that are dictating its arguments. Just poor research.

In looking at how Robb structured his book, I had an uncomfortable jolt of recognition because he set it up not unlike the way I developed my own Jason and the Argonauts book. I, too, start with a reconstructed myth--but I do so to pull it apart. I guess the difference is that I don't feel like I have the expertise and training to assert that everyone else is wrong; in writing my own book, I talked with experts in several fields and constantly checked my work against the scholarly literature. To be fair, of course, my book isn't trying to change the paradigm but rather report on the newest scholarship in the field, so I am, in a sense, merely popularizing the great work done by the many scholars I credit in my book.

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The Other J.

11/13/2013 01:43:37 pm

Beyond anything else, my skeptical spidey-sense tingles when we're dealing with Iron Age claims and Iron Age Celts who are themselves overtaking Neolithic locations. I'd be curious how many of these Iberian and Gaulish settlements were built over previous Neolithic settlements, which would negate the argument that any alignment was Celtic in the first place.

I have some friends who live on a farm out near Athy, in the eastern Midlands of Ireland. It's an old, old farm, hundreds of years old; there's a crumbling castle in one field that cows walk through, and the house is an old manor home built in a French style that's terrible for the Irish weather. (This is going somewhere.)

The husband was living in South Africa when his father passed, and he had to return home to take over the farm or lose it. Although the family has owned the land for centuries, they're not wealthy -- the husband taught high school history, and his wife taught middle school (their equivalents). The house itself is massive, but in the kind of disrepair most old buildings fall into, and they could only fix up enough of it to live in -- the living room, kitchen, and a few bedrooms.

They had to dig up the foundation of the living room when they renovated, and they uncovered some artefacts. It turned out their manor home was built over a pre-existing Iron Age ring fort. The state stepped in to do the excavations, and it turned out the Iron Age fort was built over a pre-existing settlement. So there were at least three different ages of people sitting around the fire at that one specific location, and that specific parcel of land had been recognized as valuable for at least a couple thousand years.

That's not something necessarily unique in Ireland -- people dig up artefacts cutting turf fairly regularly. But it shows that settlements often follow a kind of palimpsest structure. If any of Robb's Celts also built these sacred sites over previously-existing sites, then the whole argument would have to be displaced onto the previous tenants, if not just shelved all together.

Add me to the list of those thanking the person who helped you get this book. I hope the later chapters go better.

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Varika

11/13/2013 03:08:32 pm

It wouldn't ENTIRELY negate the concept, I think. Only if it was REGULARLY building over old sites. It's possible for coincidences to happen, or even for later people to find alignments that the previous people weren't actually thinking of.

Not that I'm particularly clinging to this Celtic astronomy concept at this point, just pointing out a weakness of your particular argument. Taking your friends' farm for an (imaginary) example, just because people built a fort there before to protect from their ancient and terrible enemy, other Celts, doesn't mean that the later farmer couldn't have built there because it offered the best place to see the constellations rise.

Still, gotta agree, it doesn't exactly HELP the guy's case.

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The Other J.

11/13/2013 03:35:47 pm

If they are built over previously-existing Neolithic sites, then I'd think the Hercules angle is pretty much over and done with. Unless he wants to argue the Greeks got the Hercules story from a previous stone-age culture from Western Europe.

Paul Cargile

11/14/2013 01:54:32 am

Here in Georgia, the same is true for most major roads, built upon old Indian trails that were in turn old deer trails. Ah the ancient mysteries of the conveniences of the paths of least resistance.

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Joe

11/14/2013 04:03:35 am

Settlement locations that lasted were in places that made sense in relation to access to water, longstanding trade routes, shelter from wind and weather, building materials, etc. It is frankly absurd to think that anybody interested in survival (which these people obviously were) would bypass prime locations to try and stick to some preconceived line. This sort of theory only makes sense if one is used to playing computer games where you can draw up your little world looking down on it from above.

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Dave Lewis

11/13/2013 07:10:11 pm

I'm imaging an episode of Monty Python with John Cleese as a representative of the "Celtic government" telling a very poor farmer,
"the government has chosen you and your family for resettlement to a new area."

"How's the water supply?" asks the farmer.

"We haven't looked into that."

"How's the soil, does it produce crops?"

"We haven't looked into that."

"is the land suitable for raising sheep and goats?"

"We haven't looked into that, but we thought you' be interested to know that the new settlement is on a line from the Sacred Promontory (near Cape St. Vincent) on the Portuguese coast to..."

At which point the farmer impales the official with a pitch fork.

Dave Lewis

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jeff

11/17/2013 03:40:34 am

Priceless comment - LOL

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Erik G

11/13/2013 10:11:55 pm

Like Varika, I'm disappointed. This book has been sitting in my wishlist for a while now, and I was looking forward to reading it. Alas...

I have always had a problem with astronomy-derived placements and ley lines and sacred geometries for ancient settlements. I can make an exception for sites like Stonehenge, and various temples and holy places, where, for example, the solstices would be of symbolic and perhaps of practical importance -- but ordinary settlements, forts and strongholds, and roads? Not at all. As Dave Lewis' Pythonesque skit shows, such sites and roads would have to be placed in accordance with water supplies, soil fertility, weather conditions, trade possibilities, and ease of defense, to give only a few examples. Roads and paths would have to conform to topology. Has Graham Robb actually visited the Pyrenees? I have. Other than for a few difficult passes in the west, the whole mountain chain is a barrier to both travel and trade -- except for the extreme east, which is where the Via Heraclea crosses from Spain into Gaul. The ancients were no less pragmatic than we are, perhaps even more so -- and it really annoys me that many historians today (both fringe and orthodox) still want to ascribe to them an other-wordliness and sensitivity that, paradoxically, makes them out as having been both naive and extraordinarily wise, much wiser than we are...

The Celts were comprised of numerous tribes. They were probably an early example of invasion/infiltration of the west. Their 'nations' stretched from Britain to as far east as Anatolia. And they fought one another constantly, betrayed one another, and did whatever they had to do to advance their own tribes. If they'd managed to unite properly against Rome, history would have taken a different path. Several Celtiberian and Gallic tribes allied themselves with Hannibal. Any Celtic shepherd or trader or veteran of raids into Italy would have known of any number of Alpine passes that could be used by the Carthaginians -- it wouldn't have required any 'hero' to point them out. Trade too was far more prevalent in ancient times than many today seem to believe.

I don't know much about Greek myths, but we shouldn't forget that there were Greek settlements in Southern Italy and Sicily for centuries, and so there would certainly have been a cross-pollination of beliefs between the Celtic world and Greece via trade.

For what it's worth: I do believe the Celts were far more sophisticated than we once believed. I would very much like to believe they did have networks of roads (as I mentioned a week or so ago) that facilitated Caesar's progress across Gaul. We still don't know much about Druids. I'd hoped Graham Robb would go into these aspects in a practical, believable manner -- but his belief in astronomically-derived straight-line roads cutting through mountain chains makes me realize that, even if he does, I just won't be able to take him seriously...

Thank you for the appropriate use of 'fringe', Jason. Much appreciated.

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BP

11/14/2013 01:41:58 am

This book caught my attention as well, and I was hoping to pick it up. However, it appears to be something I would just as soon leave alone.
Rather melodramatic of Robb to feel the need to, and indeed dramatically point out his need to, hide his incredible discovery from other academics. Although I think calling him an academic should only apply to his field of expertise.

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The Other J.

11/14/2013 02:51:35 am

Robb's academic background is another issue with this whole thing. Just because his field is French literature shouldn't mean he wasn't ever exposed to historical research, and doesn't mean he's immune from proper research protocols. Literary research includes historical research, and academic research in general follows a particular peer review gauntlet that's meant to help solidify one's arguments -- present some research to your colleagues, to your department, at a conference, publish some of it in a journal, get feedback and identify the strengths and weaknesses of your position before turning the whole thing into a book and having the weaknesses exposed in a more public way.

There is, I suppose, a slight risk of someone claim-jumping your research, but if you publish some of it early enough, you at least have a record of prior work in the subject. But refraining from presenting any work in progress because the topic was so "hot" suggests a measure of uncertainty in one's own claims, and seems to move the work out of the realm of academia and into something more like pop pseudo-scholarship -- a PhD doesn't immunize someone from that.

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BobM

11/18/2013 01:31:24 pm

The Guardian has a couple of reasonable reviews of the book.

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PhilipP

12/20/2013 07:28:43 am

I was intrigued by a highly favourable review in Literary Review given by a lecturer in creative writing. From bad experience I am conscious that 'non fiction' books are often fundamentally flawed, and that this is seldom picked up in reviews. Dr Robb's book may be worth buying for its description of Celtic chariots with the ride of a modern Porsche, but the probability that the settlements were prehistoric campsites or animal watering holes seems far more interesting and likely than the astrological explanation. Thank you for generating this line of discussion.

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Katrina

12/29/2013 06:26:59 am

I am enjoying reading this book, and I am sorry that there are so many misunderstandings in the above discussion. I hope Jason perseveres in reading it and returns with more of his impressions.

Robb has investigated sites called "Mediolanum" of which there are many in Gaul (modern France). One thing is that many of them lie on the lines he has discovered (or postulated if you will). Another is that they were not settlements. These sites are often in the middle of nowhere, and are not associated with ruins. Robb disproves previous theories about these locations quite convincingly.

This information is in the first 50 pages of the book. I would very much like to see a discussion about the book by people who are interested in reading it and discussing it.

There is every reason to believe that for the ancients, astronomy was the most interesting and challenging of natural phenomena which could be studied. Their studies depended on data collected over centuries, from which they could deduce that the world was round, that the planets had predictable cycles through the heavens, etc etc. There are striking parallels between the astronomy of Precolumbian American civilizations and the Indoeuropean knowledge base which the Greeks inherited.

There is much here for us to learn. The challenge is to be truly scientific in our study and also to allow ourselves to have the feelings that the universe inspires in us. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I read the rest of the book, and you can find my thoughts by using the search box to search for "Discovery of Middle Earth." That should take you to the other three parts of the review. I'm afraid I was not nearly as impressed with the book as you were, nor did I find his ideas "convincing." You'll see that many others who responded on this blog felt the same way, as did professional archaeologists who reviewed Robb's work.

Thank you so much for looking at this book! I've been doing some research into Celtic archeology, but it's remarkably hard given how little is known and how much pseudoscientific writing there is about it. I was considering reading this book, but all other reviews I've seen have not been very rigorous. They're more dust-jacket blurbs than critiques. I am well studied in both archeology and museum studies, but Celtic studies is certainly not my forte. Strangely, I find it easier to read and pick apart scholarly articles than I do books, if for no other reason than you can look up peer reviews and easily see where the authors' claims come from.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.